The Making of Henry Read Online Free PDF

says, throwing on a fur jacket, ‘we will come with you.’
    â€˜Don’t take me home,’ Henry cries. ‘I am never going home again.’
    But home isn’t where they are taking him. All in their furs now, like women from another country, like a family of bears strayed into town, they file out of the house, turn right into the lane, and right again, after a quarter of a mile, on to the main road which they cross, imperious as to traffic – Anastasia halting buses with a wave of her fox’s tail – until they get to Yoffey’s, where, to Henry’s unutterable confusion, they march directly to the counter, a foreign invasion – the bears, the bears are here! – and give the reason for their errand.
    â€˜For threepence!’ old man Yoffey exclaims. ‘A family delegation for threepence!’
    â€˜Not threepence, principle,’ Irina says.
    What Henry loves about his grandmother is that she uses punctuation when she speaks.
Not threepence comma principle full stop
. It is from his grandmother that Henry learns that punctuation can be a weapon. With a comma you can hurt someone. And as a person who is always being hurt himself comma Henry hankers after hurting back full stop.
    The other thing Henry loves about his grandmother is how upright and fresh-smelling she is. Most of Henry’s friends’ grandmothers are as hooped and vinegary as cucumber barrels. Not Irina. She stands tall and breathes a sort of floral dignity the way a dragon breathes fire. All the Stern Girls do. Henry thinks this is why they are called girls still: they have never collapsed into the shape of women. It is also, he knows, a condition of their being from South Manchester. South Manchester is long-stemmed and uses haughty punctuation, North Manchester is tuberous, like a potato, and mispronounces everything – buzz, for example instead of bus, botcher instead of butcher, and grass, to rhyme with mass, instead of gr-ah!-ssss, the stuff of stately garden parties where no two people are the same. Henry’s mother is from the South, his father is from the North. Hence the commonly voiced opinion that their marriage will not last. All the Stern Girls took ‘husbands’ from North Manchester, and look where that’s landed them exclamation mark!
    Old man Yoffey’s own marriage is strong but unconventional. Though he is venerably white and wispy-haired, with small watchful red-yellow eyes like a crow’s and little bones which you can see poking through his shirt, old man Yoffey intermittently raises his hand to his wife – a woman half his age and twice his size – and on occasions even brings it down. Adjoining Yoffey’s corner shop is a bay-windowed two-storey house with a small front garden, overgrown as to lawn (grass) but with carefully tended borders, pinks to one side, burgundy pansies with amazed expressions to the other; a four-foot wall of white brick encrusted with seashells protects the garden from the curiosity of the outside world, and it is over this that old man Yoffey sometimes throws his wife. Because Yoffey is a devout man whose services to the community extend beyond the provision of saveloys and plaited bread, the finger of suspicion inevitably points at drink. Ceremonially – this is the worst that can be said of him – old man Yoffey downs a thimbleful or two of sweet red Middle Eastern wine. Not much, but for some men a thimbleful is all it takes. A model husband the rest of the time, old man Yoffey turns into a wild animal whenever there is a festival or holy day. Pity poor Mrs Yoffey, then, who goes in fear at the very time everybody else in the neighbourhood is polishing silver and celebrating.
    Henry knows what the Stern Girls have to say on the subject of alcohol and he has heard tell of an occasion – or ‘incident’ as it is anecdotally referred to in the family – when his grandmother was passing just as